From age and ID restrictions on the Internet, to charging rappers with “terrorism,” the U.K. is demolishing the most basic civil liberties. If we let them, U.S. leaders may be close behind.
How many whistleblowers and reporters did Bush and Obama charge with the Espionage Act?
A lil late on that
Come on… Things have been getting worse for a while, but this is a huge turning point
I’d still like to see the numbers comparatively
What are you talking about? What numbers?
Numbers are a tool. This is apples and orange drink, you can’t reduce this to numbers
Pretty much every company that matters decided to go full 1984 censorship and surveillance all at the same time. And the governments are more than happy to play along. UK, US, etc. Pretty much all of “the west”
They are paving the way for feudalism to replace liberal democracies,
“and america could be next!” they literally have domestic concentration camps in america there is no freedom there
But how nice of the headline to imply such things don’t exist while pretending to be shocked about other things
Hopefully this doesn’t devolve into another USA vs UK shit flinging contest. Authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere, Trump and Starmer are both utilising state power to crack down on dissent and opposition. Those of us who are opposed to this shit are on the same side.
What’s happening in Britain, thought current government was a good one?
Labour is centrist and they desperately want to exert more control. English are sheep, so no one will protest daddy government.
Supposedly centrist. They’re curious whether being populist right wing on some issues will win over Reform UK voters. It’s just that they’re so curious and are doing this so often that they’re well on their way into morphing into a right wing party.
so no one will protest daddy government.
Yea this is a problem…
That was lost a while ago, but it’s nice more people are noticing that it’s getting worse.
Just what the fuck is this timeline? I was born in Russia and spent a good chunk of my life basically idolizing USA, UK, EU, other European countries, English-first countries, etc.
By the time I had the language and professional skills to try and migrate into a probably really good life, suddenly there’s a rise of authoritarianism, loss of privacy, rollback to the political right and intolerance and hatred and whatever.
There’s still a long way for these nations to go before things are as bad as here, but the differences still are dwindling at an alarming rate and I often find myself wondering if it’s gonna be worth the effort if I want to eventually move to someplace that still respects privacy and freedom and is sensible about the Internet and digital technologies.
There’s still a lot of perks from knowing English as well as I do, but at this point, I think I’d have to learn German or Swedish or some other northern EU language if I ever make up my mind.
And by the time I’m ready, these countries will roll out some bullshit, too, right?
And then there’s Visa and MasterCard telling you what you can and can’t purchase because some conservative cesspool wrote some emails - but gamers’ emails are ignored…
It’s all so demoralising. I miss looking forward to the future with hope and excitement for things.
It seems that our leaders idolize Russia back. 🤣
It’s all about this,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
Apparently, Putin’s regime is seen as an example for our leaders to follow.
P.S.: Without the direct threat that the communist USSR posed to Western elites, social-democracy faded away as the rich became more and more emboldened.
Dear christ, is there anything Russia isn’t responsible for? Apparently we’re all puppets in the West, easily hypnotized by gifs generated on washing machine CPUs, and conveniently it’s never our own making.
Please seek therapy. This “Russia Russia Russia” thing is McCarthyist hysteria on steroids.
You’re idolizing Russia as much if you think they’re somehow behind everything you don’t understand or like.
What’s the difference between your elaborate near-psychotic take and any other conspiracy theory?
Russia Russia Russia. Jesus motherfucking tapdancing Christ on a rubber crutch.
I dropped a plate this morning, Russiaaaaaaaaarrrrrgh!!!
There’s always Canada, a similarly large yet sparsely populated land with awful winters and bad food, you’ll fit right in.
As someone still in Russia, a bit of the same.
That is, I expected things to get worse, but not “avalanche of shit, cockroaches and rat bones” levels of worse.
Except the idolization part started receding much earlier, when I actually learned English well enough to understand that these are very intolerant societies. Say, where in Russia people disagreeing with you on some key matters would look at you like a fool or just decide to stop this conversation so that neither of you would offend the other, in English-speaking countries, it seems, there was simply no way to survive outside of some echo chamber and God forbid you find none to fit into. But that was like 10-15 years ago, now, of course, in Russia you can get jailed or strongly fined for words.
But I thought there’s some deeper wisdom and in those harsher societies people are also somehow better capable to maintain their common freedom and dignity yadda-yadda. In fact that’s not what I see.
As a bit of gloating - at least now the “why are you not all revolting against Putin” Western types can be answered with their own regrettable example instead of common sense and logic, these are fine, but an example is more efficient.
in those harsher societies people are also somehow better capable to maintain their common freedom and dignity
that used to be the case, back in 1960s when the economy was booming and workers were in high demand. they got paid a lot, and if you have money, you can do whatever you want and live a good life, in the US at least.
And then there’s Visa and MasterCard telling you what you can and can’t purchase because some conservative cesspool wrote some emails
They didn’t just write emails, they actually picked up the phone and called them, non stop. They made it into a problem that couldn’t be ignored. Gamers haven’t done that, unfortunately.
Don’t get your hoped too high on Germany, Switzerland and Austria…
Früher war mehr Lametta?
I don’t know, but we just got the governmental trojan back in law. It goes back and forth…
what’s happening is our current system right now is in the process of failing. it’s dying, it didn’t work and it can no longer sustain itself. Someone once said something along the lines of “When the current system fails, the next one will consist of whatever ideas are left”
So what ideas are left? the ideas of the far right, just like far right ideas are ALWAYS left when a system is about to die. So all these governments, all these wealthy individuals, all these people that have the most to gain are are going start backing the new up coming system. We’re seeing it in real time.
But this has happened time and time again. We’re a collectively dumb species and love watching repeats. it’s always the same song and dance “well lets go this way, sure it didn’t work out last time but I don’t believe it’ll happen to us THIS time”.
So it’s not so much “what the fuck is this timeline” but rather “well it’s our generations turn for bullshit”. And it always skips a generation. So the boomers didn’t experience it, but their parents did, and now it’s our turn. Hopefully our children or our Kids children will be smarter than boomers but…we as humans sure do love watching reruns.
i believe that “far-right” sentiments are a natural defense mechanism against a perceived threat.
if your tribe is in danger, you start kicking the foreigners out, you start going back culturally to what you perceive as “safe”,
it’s literally like if a windows computer fails to boot properly 3 times in a row, it re-boots into “safe mode”, which is a locked-down, dumbed-down, simplified version of the actual os. we are the computer. if people experience hardships too often throughout their daily lifes, they start “dumbing down” and “rebooting into safe mode”. just that that safe mode causes more hardships for everyone else. and that’s where we’re at right now.
Sweden teaches its kids English first now. You’ll be fine.
Back in the '80s my British father would get as far as opening his mouth to use the Swedish he’d been practicing before the shopkeeper would preempt him in flawless English “How can I help you, sir?”.
My inlaws actually don’t speak any English and they’re the first adult Swedes I’ve known that don’t. Fortunately I speak Swedish fluently but it was comedically awkward for my wife’s previous British boyfriends!
You can now do secondary schools in English in Finland.
Except if you speak Finnish or Swedish as a native language.
Fucking stupid addition. Some right-wingers afraid of Finnish dying must’ve added it to the legislation but it’s beyond silly and not having it would promote integration of non-Finnish speaking immigrants with Finnish/Swedish speaking natives. And there definitely isn’t a lot of people who would prefer doing secondary school in English. Probably more from the newer generations but still a tiny minority.
FYI Germany has been rolling out bullshit already, so that’s one out for the count. I’m in a similar situation to you, and I think it’s time to give up on the traditional first world. The future for economic immigrants is honestly pretty bleak, but your best bet is either the sane part of Eastern Europe (here’s hoping Ukraine pulls through with its democracy intact), South America or somewhere in Southeast Asia if you’re looking for a democracy with a decent standard of living.
Well, UK partially aside, your country is the root cause of all the shit happening here. Specifically Putin el Puto.
Well, not so much “cause” as pouring gasoline on what was a light smolder.
i wish people like you could take a moment to contemplate on the simple fact that russia is not to blame for every single problem that US and UK have internally. if there’s a car crash in US, people are gonna blame russia for it. if the vegetables go mold, people are gonna blame russia for it. it’s always somebody else’s fault. how about you take some self-responsibility?
And I wish people like you remembered that countries that don’t speak English existed, because I’m in Finland not USA.
You’re shifting way too much blame on Russia. Our democracies are failing by themselves, because of complacent politicians who care more about their career and being elected than doing good for their countries. Politicians who learned they don’t have to apply their promises and everything will turn out fine. Voters got pissed and fell for far right lies and propaganda.
It turned into a roaring fire by itself. Putin just made sure the fire doors don’t shut.
Well, it is one big process.
Hard to trace the power which allowed for all those slow processes of subversion to happen, but a lot of it stems ultimately from the USSR’s breakup and those who managed to make profit on it.
Western countries’ MIC’s which no more had to prepare for real war, so same big funding, but less accountability. Western politicians making profit on reducing their militaries - it’s a profitable process of selling properties and scrapping tech and such. Western advisors in ex-USSR helping their new mafia elites. Western businesses who first managed to secure some agreements to do business in ex-USSR.
Then - the tech sector, via plenty of qualified labor from ex-USSR moving to USA and other western countries. Cheap fossil fuels sold by Russia to EU countries, which became a major factor in their economies in the 90s and 00s.
Politicians in this were very notably not complacent, just looking out for themselves and noticing opportunities for themselves.
Also a lot happened just due to technical progress and lack of macro-level competition. Soviet system notably had deadlocks because interested parties couldn’t agree to one countrywide system. Suppose USSR somehow managed to survive till now, with its collegial and totalitarian-bureaucratic, but not mafia-style, government. Then total surveillance being introduced in the West now and long ago in China wouldn’t be successfully implemented in the USSR, for the similar reasons EU countries want to have their own surveillance, but not US surveillance over their citizens. In USSR it would be between ministries and factions not willing to be controlled by others. So in USSR there’d likely be some status quo.
I mean, it’s purely a hypothesis, it already imploded and there’s nothing more to say about this. Just - such things as now would sometimes happen during the Cold War too, but having a big totalitarian state as a counterweight helped a lot. Like an example of what will happen if this is allowed, and like an alternative (if we are going to have totalitarianism, then let’s at least have the red workers-and-peasants kind), and like a real threat in case of weakening of western nations.
So one can imagine that USSR’s breakup did lead in many ways to what we have now. At the same time had it not happened, then maybe on my side of the screen everything would already be surveilled (or maybe it is).
This is absolutely insane. Russia is NOT the root cause of anything bad happening in the United States. Pull your head out of your ass.
I’m in Finland. I’m also referencing the EU member countries, not just the USA. A lot of the issues here are literally due to Russia.
Edit: Trump and Republican ties to Russia are definitely also a thing.
Blaming Russia for the inadequacies of much more powerful nations like the US is pretty ignorant, imo.
Of course those countries had issues - including the USA.
But it’s Russia that interfered enough to put the far right in those countries in power. Like I said, they poured gasoline on what was already a fire
A few stolen elections in a row were approved by US politicians and various European politicians almost unanimously, because of “supporting Yeltsin against reaction”, and “if not this imperfect democracy, then Commies or neo-Nazis”, and “but we’re having a reboot of relations”, and then with almost open realpoliticking shit about how Putin is convenient to do business with, and if there’s a change of regime, it won’t be as easy.
So I would argue about root causes a lot. Especially since the root cause would be Western interference during USSR’s breakup, first aimed at preserving USSR, then after that failing aimed at preserving Russia as 1) some sort of superpower, 2) authoritarian regime led by Yeltsin’s crowd.
It doesn’t even matter that they likely didn’t know what they were doing, likely led by Tom Clancy books style idiotic ideas of the dangers and chances in that process, and the main “threat” perceived was some “radical reactionary takeover” leading to someone launching nukes just for the sake of it. It even reads idiotic, but such opinions were said officially, however nuts it was.
EDIT: And also there’s the subject of Ukraine’s nukes. If someone didn’t know, it’s not Russia that pressured Ukraine to get rid of its nukes in favor of Russia. It’s USA. Convenient to have one hegemon in a region, with whom you can deal, except that hegemon might eventually accept the idea that they are the hegemon.
Russia only helped spread the cancers that were already here
Basically yeah. Spread and grow.
But metastasized cancer is much harder to get rid of, and that’s what Russia has ensured on happening.
Ah come on. It is still assholes here deciding to be assholes.
Uh, America had free speech? First I’m hearing about it.
With a president meddling in both universities and media free speech, there is no way to seriously say USA has free speech.
But even before these issues freedom of speech was very challenged in USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_IndexIf you’re wealthy enough, you can do whatever you want.
Freedom™
thank you random Canadian Lemmy user!
/s
You’re more than welcome!
Very information heavy article. I appreciate that.
I already can’t say what I really think about politicians and CEOs without getting banned from comments all over the place, so didn’t preach to me about censorship. I’m already chest deep in this shit.
The UK has really crossed a red line by overtly outlawwing support of Palestinian Action.
on Lemmy? you’d get banned? what, do you think CEOs and cops are really, really good? and they ban for that?
I don’t know if you just don’t pay attention or if you haven’t been on world much like this community is.
I just wanna know if they think CEOs are really really cool or something. like what’s the bannable opinion?
pro landlord?
.World admins have pretty strict policies against advocating for violence of any form is what I believe they are referencing.
So just your first time on world then okay I got you. Not familiar with the mod team around here. Got it
Remember VPNs definitely don’t help here, definitely don’t try to skirt any protections using a VPN, definitely remember to have your ID with you at the ready for any website to show to.
If you could project into the future, you might see that VPNs are a dwindling non-solution to the problem. As this unsettling trend makes waves across all jurisdictions in the world, every VPN’s IP will be subject to these new controls.* Eventually normies might need to understand technologies like Tor or I2P. Only problem is, if things get really bad they might ban the use of both outright. I’m not sure if I2P can be detected just as Tor, but I do know Tor users can be detected easily. Which is why if you’re in a “censorship” country you need to use some sort of special subset of entry guards. I2P might be better because every node in the network is like a router, none are specifically entry, middle, or exit nodes. Only thing I could think of, maybe some form of deep packet inspection? If everybody runs an I2P router, then simply making requests to other nodes is not enough to determine it’s an i2p communication?* It’s just distributed computing, the way the internet was intended!
Any other useful info like this? Tryna snag as much of this stuff as possible (taking screenshots and offline copies of the pages) in the event it becomes unavailable and my existing methods fail on me.
You can simply go to the official tor or i2p pages and read more about details, then do follow up research from there. With i2p there’s actually a few parallel implementations actively being developed. Original is in Java, there’s a C++ one, and then another one I can’t remember. Very new implementations are being made in Rust as well
You’ve convinced me to create an i2p router
I found this to get me started: https://www.reddit.com/r/i2p/comments/zp9p94/setting_up_an_i2p_router_on_a_raspberry_pi/
Thanks for volunteering to help the network in good faith! I think it is much easier for normal people to get an i2p router up and running and help the entire network, instead of setting up a tor node. And with the use of inbound/outbound unidirectional tunnels (which you can set up to 5 nodes each), you could theoretically have a 10 node round trip of intermediate tunnels between you and a server, as opposed to tor which uses a bidirectional tunnel.
Some gracious users set up what is known as an “outbound proxy”, which acts like tor exit node to the clearnet. Personally I would never host one of these, as I am hesitant of having anonymous entities make clearnet requests and being held liable. But as an i2p router in somebody else’s tunnels, you can just imagine yourself as a road on a map that other roads connect to. The road isn’t responsible for what people are carrying on it, or what their destination might be. That would be an unreasonable expectation to place on any road. In fact, the router doesn’t have any idea of what the exact destination is, even if it’s the last node in the tunnel - simply because during the encryption/decryption process it only knows of the next address to hit!
For example, say an i2p router hosts a git server. It could be the destination for packets, where clients are using it for version control, or it could act as a node in somebody’s tunnels to connect with other servers/clients. From the network view, I do not believe you can tell, and that is pretty neat.
In the effort of being transparent and educating you, I do believe an outstanding problem is stream isolation. You should be able to do “soft resets” that reset your identity, although I forget the exact technical i2p term for this. This concern is for clients, not just leaving a router up. So if you intend on using that router to access the network yourself, it would be a good idea to do that soft or hard reset occasionally depending on your concerns. You can do it as often or never at all.
It’s a good thing there are no scammers that could try stealing IDs pretending to verify you 😌
I think the US will be fine as long as we don’t repeatedly elect some kind of cabal of pedophile authoritarians.
Irony is truly lost on this platform
I feel like that was the entire intent of the comment you are replying to
It definitely was, please see my other comment below somewheres
why do you say that? seems like a pretty ironic thing to say. found it!
I think it was being downvoted or something, or maybe I just anticipated people not picking up the invisible /s. No clue at this point, I had some beer demons in me last night
You mean the Republican party? At this point I’m convinced their voter based would elect a serial killer so long as they said they were Republican.
It’s a YUGE stretch to assume there were no democrats in the Epstein files.
Maybe, but they aren’t nearly as authoritarian.
You mean the Republican party?
Yes that’s the joke lol
deleted by creator
It’s just very unnecessary when you’re repeating the joke
Well if you check other replies, others clearly don’t agree that this only applies to Republicans.
It doesn’t change the intent of the joke
I mean they re-elected Bush so.
Ted Cruz
The US is already well down the path with masked men kidnapping people on the street, holding them without any contact, defunding all sorts of media and billionaires suppressing all sorts off stuff in their media outlets.
Britain has never had free speech in the same way as the US, nor even of the press. Only in the last few decades, they’ve only had what’s required by the ECHR.
They literally have a Press Censorship system where they will send something called “D-Notices” to newspapers to shut them up.
Well US free speech is telling lies and misleading millions of people on broadcast television.
I’d argue that’s more of a problem with media consolidation and not having some form of truth requirement in broadcast media. When only a handful of organizations own the majority of media outlets and aren’t held to account for their content, this is what we end up with and why we can’t have nice things.
GB is #20 world press freedom, netizens included. USA are on #57… So what do you mean exactly by “never had free speech in the same way as the US”?
US lost thiers before, UK did.
